1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer analysis technology in the field of research in life science. Particularly, it relates to technology for executing a bioinformatics analysis program available on the Internet.
2. Background Art
The development of the field of research in life science has been remarkable over the past dozen years or so. Especially, rapid growth has been achieved in bioinformatics due to improvements in the performance and ease of computers. Life science is a field that requires further computing power, along with space physics, and a similar development is continuously expected.
Currently, various bioinformatics analysis programs or tools are available on the Internet. These analysis programs are added and updated daily by researchers all over the world. However, the current situation is that general researchers cannot keep up with the pace of an increase in the number of these analysis programs and the pace of progress thereof. There are two reasons for such problems: (1) many of the up-to-date bioinformatics analysis programs and tools are made publicly available as the command line programs of UNIX (trademark of X/Open Company Ltd.) or Windows OS (trademark of Microsoft Corporation). Thus, these tools are not necessarily easily used by general researchers who are not familiar with these programs; and (2) in order to obtain an up-to-date analysis program, the user needs to make efforts to obtain information by him/herself. Researchers having a great deal of work do not have time for continuously and completely watching worldwide up-to-date information available on the Internet.
Thus, researchers have no choice but to use general-purpose analysis software programs having many functions. However, general-purpose analysis software programs generally lack flexibility, and they cannot deal with ever-increasing and ever-progressing analysis methods. Thus, it is impossible to use up-to-date analysis methods, and in the first place, it is practically impossible to support all the various fields of research.
Furthermore, since different files are outputted for individual analysis programs when analysis results are stored, it is difficult to save data or search for the results.
Patent Document 1: JP Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-228155 A